I realized that both of them were looking expectantly at me.

"Sorry, I was thinking about…er…did you ask something?"

"I asked you why Hope said she responded when you summoned her."

"I didn't summon her." I frowned for a moment, remembering something the hallucination woman—not a hallucination if the man in front of me was to be believed—said when she popped through those funny lights in the air. The lights themselves gave me no trouble: they were clearly pollen in the air, which I in my half-sun-blinded state interpreted as sparkling. Hope was a bit less easily explained, but no doubt she had been hiding behind a tree, and took advantage of an inattentive moment to make her appearance. "She said something about being glad I summoned her when I did, and that she was in danger and couldn't stay or she'd be killed."

"She is a virtue," Theo said as he rubbed his chin. The sweep of his thumb across his square chin distracted me for a moment, but I was firm with myself and looked at the grain of the wood in the door behind him, instead. "She cannot die unless she is removed from the Court. If she was in danger from someone, that would explain why I had such a difficult time tracking her down…Very well, continue. Who did she say she was in danger from?"

"From whom," Sarah corrected with a smile. Theo looked at her. "Sorry. I'm a writer. It's second nature."

"She didn't say. She just told me she was in danger, and that if she stayed, all would be destroyed. She was very drama queen about the whole thing, frankly, which is why I had no trouble believing she wasn't real. What exactly is a virtue, other than the normal definition of the word?"